I fully intended to do the tote repair and the refinishing of the tote and knob in one post but shop time has been scarce so I'm going to just go ahead and cover the repair of the broken horn on the tote and circle back with another entry when I get the finishing done.

Looking at the before picture of this plane, we can see that the tote has suffered a grievous injury.

So let's do a little surgery

First thing I did was to use a fine belt on my belt grinder and remove the bulk of the film finish.

Once most of the finish is gone, there are some minor facets created and there is still some finish left in the hard-to-reach spots. So I switch to hand sanding with these handy rubber thingamabobbers I have for sanding inside and outside curves.

I sand with 100 grit just enough to remove the rest of the finish, smooth out the facets created on the belt grinder and bring the entire piece to a uniform scratch pattern. Throughout the sanding process, I am careful to sand with the grain which can be difficult at times…

Eventually we end up with a sanded piece with no finish left. For the time being, I stop at the 100 grit. I'll sand up to higher grits before finishing but I'll wait until after the horn repair is complete to sand any further.

I took the tote off one of my other planes and used it as a template for the new horn. Here we have the busted tote sitting on top of the good one.

I select a piece of Cocobolo that I think will match pretty well in color and grain and cut a small piece.

Then I cut the tote just below the break so I have a clean, flat surface to work off of.

I cut the repair piece at an angle so that when glued together, the grain will run in the same direction.

Now I mix up some 2 part epoxy and dye it a very dark red. I could use yellow glue, I have often with Cocobolo, but I want to use epoxy in this case so I can dye it to help hide the repair line.

And we marry the pieces together. I now pronounce you tote and horn.

I've seen several clever ways to hold odd-shaped pieces like these together when gluing. My leg vise and a holdfast get the job done more often than not though.

After letting the epoxy cure overnight, I go back to the belt grinder and carefully sand the repair piece so it's flush with the sides of the tote. This makes it easier to do the next step which is bandsawing. I laid the template on top and marked the outline and then went to the bandsaw and removed the excess material being careful to leave my layout line.

Next is the long part. It's always tempting to me to use my belt sander and OSS or rotary tool to shape this but it never, ever comes out like I hoped. I'm sure some people use power tools and get great results. But for me, I take my time and pull out some rasps and sandpaper.

I start by using a sculptor's rasp to put the radii in. I use the radii on the existing part as a guide and just try to make the transition smooth, consistent and symmetric.

After I'm pretty happy with that general shape, I lay my template on top and mark the radius at the end.

Then it's more rasping to bring the shape down to that line.

Finally we're pretty close to our final shape.

But it still looks kind of "blocky" and there are some pretty rough spots left from the rasps. So, we go back to 100 grit sandpaper and the rubber shapes to do the final shaping.

Eventually I get where I'm happy with it.

One last problem to tackle. We've partially covered up the counterbore for the cylindrical nut that fixes the tote to the base. The thru hole is 5/16" on this tote so I take a 5/16" drill bit in a cordless drill and let it follow the existing hole and drill through the patched piece.

Now I have a hole to use for alignment to drill out the 7/16" counterbore. I chucked the 5/16 drill up in my mill (drill press will work too, you'll just want to use a twist drill to pilot for a flat-bottom drill) and push the tote up on it.

Then I bring the vise so it aligns with the tote and clamp it down. There are more precise ways to get the tote positioned and angled properly. But this way is super fast and easy and has never failed me.

Now it's just a matter of removing the 5/16" drill and putting a 7/16" end mill in the spindle and boring down a little at a time until we remove all of the repair material.

And we're done. I took it off and checked the fit with the threaded rod and cylindrical nut and we're good to go

Now we can see the color ain't so good…

I'm gonna give it a few days out in the sunlight and see how close it gets. Cocobolo turns pretty dark pretty quick with oxidation and UV exposure.

So I'll just wait and see if I'm happy with the color match after letting it darken naturally. If not, we may see an entry on torching Cocobolo or dying it. Or both

Otherwise, the next entry will be on the finishing schedule for this tote and the knob. I'm not going to cover prepping of the knob in this blog. My method is the same as it was in my old blog. The only difference is that with this Cocobolo, I'll sand to a finer grit than I did in that blog.

So thanks for reading and I'll be back when I get some more progress under my belt…

Edit to add: I know most people don't have a milling machine and a lot of people may not even have a drill press. So I wanted to give an alternative to opening the hole back up on top in the absence of either of those machines. This video was shared with me by LJ Kent in a forum thread the other day. At about the 35 minute mark, he shows how he uses a Dremel tool to carefully size the hole in the repair piece to match the existing bore in the original wood. The whole video is worth a watch. He's pretty much doing an identical repair to the one I did in this blog post but he has some very different ways to skin the cat from how I did it. You may find his more accessible than my own